It seems always to be my joy and privilege, the first night, to look over the group and see who is here. And I can assure you tonight, it is a real joy to see folk who have gathered from so many places.
I marvel at the goodness of the Lord in bringing us together: all the way from Seattle, Washington; the southern part of California; Texas; Michigan; Indianapolis; Canada; the New England states; and Florida. Where did I miss?
Germany. And we have some from Taipei, I understand, and London. Oh, excuse me. That was not deliberate.
Yes, brother, I was registering that in my mind—all the way from Manila.
Well, why did we come? Why are we here?
I am very much burdened for that. Because if it is just another conference, you could have found one at home much closer. But I am sure that, as we suggested in the little brochure that went out, God, back in the days when Israel was gathered, blew the trumpet, and they gathered because they wanted to hear a word from the Lord.
And I am sure our gathering this year is not just because we have some little anticipation of a new blessing, or a new joy, or a new thrill, but that we are here with an expectancy that God will make more clear and more real than ever before that which He is doing in this hour.
I must tell you, before we go to prayer now and look to the Lord in His Word, I have been greatly burdened these last few weeks. I do not know how to put it in words or how to express it; it is just a deep sense within. But this is a very important year in our gathering.
And we are about to verge either to settle into just a nice gathering, or to press into the things that God really wants for this country—that is, that which fits into His larger purpose.
And I do pray that, as we are gathered, there is that inner sense within, the cry of our individual heart: “Oh, Lord, do not let us be satisfied with mere fellowship.”
You pardon my saying this, but as I gathered this evening before our evening meal, I thought, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful? I haven’t seen brother so-and-so for a year, and sister so-and-so.” And it is quite a family reunion after four years. It really is.
And some of you who have come—we have not seen you here before, but we have seen you in other places—it is a real joy. But, you know, there is something quite dangerous about just knowing one another after the flesh, just enjoying our fellowship, as it were, on this basis.
And it was one of the reasons I kept telling Brother Chase and some of the others, “I would rather not come. You need another boy, someone who will really step on their toes. I am beginning to love them too much. It is harder.”
But I pray that the Lord will give us His own voice. There will be a very real sense of knowing what He wants to say, and it will not be Brother Sparks, or Brother Kong, or Brother Franci, but it will be the Lord speaking. And all this tendency to just gather for that kind of fellowship will be laid aside. There will be the expectancy that we will hear the voice of the Lord.
Well, I do not need to tell you that, because some of you have been praying about it. You are as much aware of it as I am.
But I would tonight, before we look into the Word, that we might gather our hearts now just in one cry unto Him and ask that He will speak to us; and that we might honor the Holy Spirit in our midst. That is not a doctrine with us. We must learn to honor His ministry, and that we will know what it is to truly exalt the Lord Jesus to His rightful place as Head and Lord, and how then best to glorify our Father.
So we pray together.
Lord, we do not rush into Thy presence tonight. We do not come merely with our ambition or our desire for this meeting, or these days of gathering. But we are here, opening our hearts as a group of people assembled, claiming that we might truly know Thy voice in our midst.
If it would be the voice of a prophet that would shake and jar and stir and awaken the lethargy, the carelessness, the indifference that is so prone to come upon Thy people, we pray that there will be that voice in our midst.
If it needs to be the voice of enlightenment to lift someone who has been going through bondage, heavy struggling, needing Thy own liberty and victory, we pray, Lord, Thou wilt have that voice of comfort and encouragement and insight.
Lord, for Thy people who are gathered, coming from various fellowships, we pray that there will be the enlarging of vision. Oh, dear Lord, this is a desperate hour in which we live. We must have a word from Thee. We must have a clearer thing than we have ever had before.
And we pray tonight that, as we come to Thy Word, the Holy Spirit may make the Word very real and very living and very quickening, encouraging, strengthening. Give us that clear seeing, that crystal-clear seeing, dear Lord, because Thou art here to breathe upon the Word and to make it to be Thy Word personally to us.
We thank Thee tonight for gathering Thy people from such a wide area. We pray, dear Lord, that Thou wilt quickly break down any of these things that hinder us in a real coming into a oneness of mind and spirit. Take away the strangeness. Take away our proneness still, Lord, to be self-conscious, and help us to lose ourselves in Thee and in expectancy.
We pray tonight, Lord, that Thou wilt take this service, and may Thy anointing—Thy anointing—be very real in our midst. And wherein, Lord, Thou hast a word to speak to any heart at the point of real need tonight, do not miss us in this first service.
Do not let us go along meeting after meeting just in a mere ritual or performance of some little service. But, oh Lord, let there be a real sense of Thy Spirit unveiling, uncovering our hearts before us.
We ask in the name of the Lord Jesus, with thanksgiving. Amen.
I would like for you to turn to the book of Ephesians tonight. Ephesians, chapter 1.
I think, in the times that we are sharing with you—perhaps the second session in the morning from now on—we will be asking the Lord to take us from day to day. But probably we will be speaking on what I would like to call some of the imperatives of this hour.
The first that I want to share with us tonight is found in Paul’s two prayers for the Ephesians. We know that in the first chapter and in the third chapter of Ephesians, we have two very wonderful prayers before us.
I like to call this first prayer in Ephesians 1, beginning with verse 15, a prayer for enlarged vision. Can you imagine the apostle Paul considering this church at Ephesus, the church that has gone a long way in the Lord? What would he share with them? What would their need be?
Well, we will look at it. Ephesians 1, then, is that prayer for the enlargement of vision. Then, when we get to the third chapter, I think that Paul’s burden and prayer is for the increased experience in what they have seen—not merely knowing of some of these things, but the fulfillment of them in their life.
So we have the first prayer for enlarged vision; then, in the third chapter, enlarged experience, or the fuller outworking of it in their lives.
I think I must be very open with you in this first service tonight and simply say that, because I have moved among the Lord’s people now for some twenty years in various places, I keep having an increased burden. I cannot get away from it. It presses upon me once again tonight.
I do not see that Christendom, or that God’s people, are ever going to come to that full thought the Lord has unless we can get hold of this principle we want to deal with in chapter 1.
Paul is praying. He says in Ephesians 1:15:
Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints,
cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers;
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,
may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him:
the eyes of your understanding being enlightened;
that ye may know what is the hope of His calling,
and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe,
according to the working of His mighty power,
which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead,
and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion,
and every name that is named,
not only in this world, but also in that which is to come:
and He put all things under His feet,
and gave Him to be the head over all things to the church,
which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
It seems that Paul reaches a point in verse 15 where the groaning deep within is, “Oh, God, that this people might see something more, and something else, something larger.”
I like to put it in these terms. We will try this tonight. I do not know whether we will need this light to be turned out. I like to picture it as though Paul is saying that here is the large framework—here is the large framework that God wants us to live in.
He says, “Oh, that their eyes might be open. Oh, that they might see.” See what? “Oh, that they might grasp something else.” Grasp what?
Here he is saying, first of all, in verse 18: “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of His calling.” Another translation says, “What is the nature of this calling that they have?” And, “What is the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints?”
You see, the great majority of Christendom tonight is living not in what I call the larger framework, or horizon, of God’s purpose and working. But I like to picture them pretty much right here.
We usually start with Adam and the fall. And we find man in his fallen condition, desperately in need of help. In this condition, we see man needing to be delivered from the slavery of sin, and the devil, and the world, and the flesh, and all of these things.
And our difficulty is that too much of the time we deal here, in a small framework. That is very wonderful and very necessary. We speak of God’s redemptive work at the cross, what He has done to deliver man from his fallen condition.
But the question is this: Why did God create man? So He would have somebody to save? Why did God create man? What was that purpose that He had way back here in the beginning, when God started the whole progress of things?
I think we need to reckon with God’s larger purpose and then see the redemptive purpose in its relationship to the larger thing that He is working on.
Let us make a distinction, then, between God’s redemption—His redemptive purpose—and this larger framework we call the eternal purpose in Christ.
It seems that when Paul starts here in Ephesians, he starts with God way back in the very beginning. Notice how verse 3 starts:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ:
even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and without blemish before Him in love.
We start with God. This is Paul’s starting point. We start with the God and Father who is looking from this horizon, or this scope, to this scope. And what is He working toward? What is the grand summation toward which all things are moving? What really is He after?
This is the theme, the central—or, let us say, the overall larger theme—that God has in view in bringing the real, wonderful purpose of His Son into focus.
I remember, oh, it must be four or five years ago now, I was in a home down in South Carolina having some ministry.
The first meal I ate was at the home of a young man who was pastoring a small group. I noticed two lovely daughters sitting at the table. One was an eighth-grader and the other was a freshman.
And in our getting acquainted those first few minutes, I saw they were very bright-eyed girls, very keen. And I asked them, being an old schoolteacher myself, I said, “I wonder, do you like to write themes? What is a theme? Do you like to write themes?”
Their eyes both opened wide. They said, “Oh, we love English.”
I said, “I am going to be here for about a week, and I would like to have you do something for me. I will give you each two dollars and fifty cents if you will write a theme for me—a twenty-five-word theme.”
Oh, I tell you, I do not know how much they had, but I will tell you, they were all ready to take my two dollars and fifty cents. I could see them all reaching out because they were good students.
And one of them looked at me and said, “Well, what do you want us to write the theme on?”
I said, “Well, that is a little more difficult to explain. But I want you to tell me what you think is God’s great, glorious, ultimate theme in the universe. What is the thing that God really wants to do in this universe?”
“If you can write that for me in twenty-five words—now, a theme is taking all these thoughts and developing them around one central idea.”
And I could tell, with just a minute’s look, they thought, “We are going to get the easiest two dollars and fifty cents we have ever had.”
I thought maybe I had better spare them just a little bit of embarrassment, because I am kind of strict that when I hand out an assignment, I usually expect the right thing.
So I said, “Now, just in case we get off on some tangent, let us just talk a little bit. What do you think God’s great, grand, glorious theme is? What do you think—the one thing that is most important to Him that He is working out? What do you think that God is really after?”
A little eighth-grader put forth her hand, and she said, “Oh, Brother Franci, ever since I became a Christian and I invited Jesus Christ to come into my heart, the most important thing to me has been getting saved and getting to heaven.”
And I will not forget looking at her and saying, “Oh, how wonderful it is when the Lord Jesus comes into our heart and we know that we belong to Him. We have been saved by the precious blood.”
“But,” I said, “I do not believe that is the great theme of the Scripture, or the great thing that God is after. Now, I grant you, up to this point it has been the most important thing to you.”
But I asked the question. And her eyes were quite quizzical. She thought maybe they had a real heretic at the table, just like some of you might have this moment.
I said, “You know, did you ever stop to consider? Did you ever stop to consider when God created Adam, before he sinned and needed a Savior—before man ever fell—what was the great purpose that God was working out? What was that wonderful thing that He had in mind?”
I said, “If you can tell me what that is, then you can start writing your theme.”
Well, we went on to the service that night. They kept scratching their brow every time they would sit in the meeting. “Won’t you just tell us a little bit?”
I said, “No, but I believe the Holy Spirit will. And I would much rather have Him tell you that larger thing that God is working toward, in order that you can give yourself to it, and your dedication and your consecration can be to that which God is after.”
Well, we discovered every time we got to the table, we got to talking. We discovered that the great majority of people are interested in God’s purpose. Everybody will say, “Oh, praise God, He has a wonderful purpose. Isn’t that wonderful? And I am interested in God’s purpose.”
But the only difficulty is, it is always God’s purpose for me.
And before we are through, we have got the whole universe, God and everything else that He is doing; and we read the whole Bible through our colored glasses. And if we were to write our theme like these girls would have, we would talk about the great, grand, glorious purpose that God has for me.
Now, do not get alarmed. God has a purpose for you. But you will never be able to really find Him; you will never really be able to grasp; you will never quite get what we are wanting to know of God’s purpose for us until somehow we can get exploded out of ourselves as the center.
And we can begin to see things in relationship to that larger purpose that He has for Himself, which would have taken place if we had never touched the globe—that larger purpose that God has for His Son, which is going to find its fulfillment and its consummation in His lovely Son.
And why He puts Him out on display and holds Him out is the object toward which our attention turns.
Well, I will not forget. I kept waiting service after service. It was the fourth night, I believe, in the meeting. We got into Ephesians. We began to talk a little bit. I never can repeat the messages, because we just stop and start, sort of.
But I remember we were talking from Ephesians, and I looked back and I saw the light bulb go on in the freshman. And she began to write. I am sure she had a hundred words before the service was over.
And I said, “Twenty-five, you know.” It was quite difficult for some people to be very brief. It has been one of my big problems through the years, as some of you know.
But God, through those days, I believe, really did something in the hearts of those two young girls. I will never forget.
And I have just sort of been praying, “Lord, are there some more eighth-graders and freshmen that we can include in what I would like to have God unveil as that larger, grand, glorious thing that He is working toward, which we need to get hold of?”
You see, what happens is this. When we start with man and the fall, and we get man saved, and he knows that he is saved and he is saved by grace, then the average pastor sits back—or rather, has a difficult time with those who are sitting back in the church pew.
The pastor pours out his heart week after week, Sunday after Sunday, trying to encourage and enthuse the people to be better Christians, to live and to do more for God.
But they all say, in one way or another, when they get to the door and shake hands, “Pastor, do not get excited. What are you worried about? I am saved. I am just waiting for the rapture. So do not get excited.”
We have created something in our country. We have created in Christendom something that we do not like. But we do not know just what it is, or how we have done it.
And I am saying that a great difficulty tonight is simply that the great majority of people live within this little narrow framework, as though the full program, the only program, the really only thing that God is interested in, is just redemption.
Now bear with me for a little bit. I know that shocks some of them. And I am just as concerned for seeing people converted, being really brought into a full knowledge of the work of the cross, as any of you.
But I know that something happened to me one day that I will never be able to explain. Something took place when my little narrow vision exploded and I began to see that God, from the very beginning, had planned something as a wonderful goal, as a wonderful purpose, that He was working out in His Son.
And sin was not necessary. The fall was not necessary. Man did not have to sin so that God would have somebody to save.
If we are not careful, we go around and we get the whole thing so mixed up that pretty soon God becomes responsible for sin.
I say repeatedly tonight: God had something in His heart when He began—this wonderful, glorious, eternal purpose that is in His Son—that did not require sin as a means for accomplishing it, or the fall.
Now, I know that man sinned, and so God has incorporated—God has brought all of this travesty in as a means by which He can realize what He is after. But in no way is God responsible.
Well, let us start where Paul starts. Genesis, you remember, starts with Adam—at least the chapter after. But when Paul starts, it is before creation.
He goes way back when things are still on the drafting board. He goes way back when it is still in the planning stage. And I love this. It seems that he is saying in verse 4:
Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and without blemish before Him in love.
It seems that what he is saying is, as He looks down to the very end, His plan is that He should have those who would be immediately before Him, as His joy, as His fellowship, in His love.
Weymouth puts this translation: “Those who are in His immediate presence continually before Him.” This gives us a picture of the enjoyment and the satisfaction He will have from them.
It brings us to see likewise that when He is satisfied, then we likewise enter into an enjoyment.
So he says, Ephesians 1:5:
Having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself,
according to the good pleasure of His will.
We have said on other occasions here, and I repeat tonight, that once God has lifted us from our sinful condition and He has given us life in Christ, this life is unto something and it is for something.
We are like little babes that have life. We are a child. The Greek word is teknon, a little child who has just received the life of God.
But there is something else that God is working toward. And that is the taking of all of these who now come to share the life and placing them, as they are individually built together, brought together, placing them as one new man.
In this glorious placing, then they become the sons of God—the sons in full right, full privilege, full authority—living unto the thing that God has ordained.
You see, our problem when we read this word adoption, our Western conception is going out to an orphanage someplace and bringing a child from some broken home, or someplace where parents have passed on, bringing someone outside the family and bringing them into our family. We say that is adoption.
Now, that is our conception of adoption. But, as I understand through the Scripture, God’s conception of adoption is the taking of one who is already in the family, one who already shares the life.
And in the fullness of the time of the Father, in that fullness of time, the placing of that child in the position where he can share some of the rights, some of the privileges, some of the authority—the placing of that child as a son.
And so, instead of being a teknon, to become a huios—H-U-I-O-S—one who then begins to enjoy the privileges of sonship.
I do not know how far I should go in this. Some of you may have seen the investiture of the Prince of Wales the other day.
And I thought, as I saw this queenly mother with a teknon, a child—that is what he had been up to that moment—there he stood. And she took all the marks, all of the things with which she was going to invest him, in the placing of this child in a position of sonship.
Now, it does not fit all that we are speaking of, and yet I saw how wonderful it was. And when the boy-child looked up and his mother was getting the crown ready to put on his head, he ducked under to help her a little bit. I thought, “He has been doing that since he was a baby.”
You could see that coy look on his face. You did not see this, did you? You missed something, Brother Sparks.
I thought, “Oh, how wonderful a picture this is of one who has been a child in the family all of these years, now finally coming to the place where he is receiving some rights and privileges.”
You remember Isaiah, back in the Old Testament, said:
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon His shoulder.
And I thought, when she was investing these rights, “Oh, how wonderful that one day God Himself is going to bring into manifestation those who have been teknons and are enjoying right now the spirit of sonship, learning more and more how to walk after the Spirit.”
But in that day, when His Son and the corporate son comes into the full position that God has planned, and all things are headed up in Him, how wonderful—how wonderful—the privilege that is ours.
So this causes me to say, then, that as long as we are living in this little narrow framework, we are interested primarily in our inheritance.
Paul says, beginning in verse 7 of this first chapter:
In Whom we have our redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,
according to the riches of His grace,
which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence.
We can think of all the things that become ours, that are available to us because Jesus Christ died. Forgiveness, life—we have all of this that comes as an inheritance.
What is necessary if we are to receive an inheritance? How do you get an inheritance? Someone usually dies. And it is through His death—Jesus Christ died—we come to enjoy the inheritance.
And this is it. Paul, I think, is saying of the Ephesians, “Oh, I want you to remember now, this is your inheritance through the death of Christ.”
But there comes this deep groaning within, and you see him praying in verse 15, “Oh, that they might have an enlarged vision.” Not only seeing the inheritance that we have in Christ, but coming to the larger framework.
He is praying, “Oh, that they might see, that they might grasp, God’s inheritance in the saints.” That is His inheritance—His inheritance.
I think the majority of us have spent our life alive to what we get through Jesus Christ—what is ours. We must not minimize it. Never.
But there comes a time when God wants to explode this little narrow framework in which we are prone to live, and bring us to the place where suddenly we begin to see that which God has called His people to.
And then the cry of the heart is, “Oh God, that You might have Your inheritance in the saints.”
I honestly believe, brothers and sisters, that there is an undertone about every life that gives it away.
What do you mean by an undertone? There is something of a deep awareness that you have in every life. Either they are living primarily cooped up in what they can get from the Lord, what God can do for them, the things that they have through the work of Calvary—and that is about as far as they go.
Or you sense that largeness, that expansion, something that has brought them in line with the larger purpose that God is after.
And just as sure as you sense it, you hear that groan within a life: “Just so God gets something out of it. Just so He is satisfied. Just so He has the glory.” The relatedness is always a different direction—always a different direction.
But as long as I am relating everything that is happening just to me, I have that deep undertone of, “Poor me. How am I going to make it through? Is this necessary?”
“I will hold on to the bitter end.” That undertone gives us away.
But you hear something of the largeness in Paul’s own heart back in Philippians. He says:
Brethren, I would have you know that the things which happened unto me
have fallen out rather unto the progress of the gospel.
Whatever comes, just so the Lord can use it, just so God can work it around. “All things work together for my good.” I hate to admit how long I interpreted that verse that way.
I will have to tell you of a missionary friend. We were sitting one evening after service. She had been on the field, I think, for two or three terms.
As I walked into the parsonage that night, she was sitting by the fireplace. I saw she had been weeping. She said, “Sit down.”
After a moment or two of silence, she looked up and she said, “You know, something really happened to me tonight. I had an explosion.” That was her way of putting it. “I had an explosion take place.”
I said, “Oh, tell me about it.”
She said, “Well, you know, for years, all my time on the mission field, I bit my lips whenever things were going hard, and I would pound my fists a little bit, and I would stiffen my backbone, and I would look out and I would say, ‘All things work together for good.’”
“But,” she said, “all this time I had been enduring because I knew it would work for my good.”
She said, “But, oh, I have been miserable to work with. And if people only knew the inner complaint and the dissatisfaction and all the grumbling and complaining, because here I had been so dedicated and consecrated to the Lord, and yet He let all these things happen to me.”
She said, “Tonight God showed me how small my little world was, how everything that happened I had only been relating to my benefit, my enlargement, my victory.”
She said, “I have misinterpreted Romans 8:28 all these years. But I found a new verse tonight.”
I said, “Oh, tell me about it.”
She said, “It is over in Philippians.” And I had just quoted it to you. She said, “I found that God has released me from relating things just to myself as a center.”
“And like Paul, I can say, ‘Brethren, I would have you know that the things that have happened unto me are for the furtherance of the gospel.’ Lord, if You can get something.”
You see, beloved, we can talk about the thing that was amazing to me as our dear sister opened up her heart. I found how much she knew about the cross, and the victorious life, and the deeper life.
We all have a lot of knowledge of these things. But there comes a time when God works a real explosion—a real explosion that somehow enlarges, enlarges.
And we no longer see just the whole of our life in this little framework of being conformed to the image of the Lord and all the victories that God has wrought.
I say tonight, and I do not want to be misunderstood, our big difficulty in Christendom tonight is that people think they are living with a larger conception, and their cry is, “Oh God, that You will get Your purpose worked out, that thing You are working in and through Jesus Christ will be realized.”
Yet all the time we have a peculiar way of relating it back. We have the knowledge of it, but we go through something: “Why did this happen to me? Lord, I am dedicated. I am more consecrated. And things seem to get worse, and the pressures come.”
Well, I wrote a book on this about seven years ago, and I am just discovering in a whole new way how much knowledge I had, and how much God wants to bring it into reality.
Notice this phrase that Paul makes in verse 17. I want us to see it again:
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,
may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.
I wish I could hammer those three or four words there: in the knowledge of Him. In the knowledge of Him.
You see, all the knowledge that we get is to be a by-product, but it is primarily the knowledge of Him.
Oh, this is what we are after these days. You will have to pray. I am groaning that God will make this real to us in our fellowship together.
But our problem is that we get so many bits of knowledge, but they are all unrelated, and they are just knowledge out here. And God is wanting to focus us in upon the One that He is interested in, and everything else flows out of this: the knowledge of Him.
We will see, I believe—I trust—the knowledge of Him, the knowledge of Him, shut up to Him, the knowledge of Him.
You see, everything that the Father is doing is first of all for His lovely Son. He puts Him out on display. He is saying, “I want you to see Him.”
The thing is moving to that end. It is all being accomplished by Him. It is all being accomplished in and through Him. He will not let us get away from Him.
And so he is praying, “Oh, Lord. Oh, Father. Help them to see the larger framework, the eyes of their understanding, the inheritance that God is going to get in the saints, and the nature of the calling—the nature of this calling.”
Quickly, let us just look at a few verses in the third chapter.
Once again, Paul launches into the third chapter, and I find him getting to the same place about verse 13. He is saying, “Oh, God.” He begins to pray, “Oh, Father, that You will show them.”
Ephesians 3:13-21:
Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.
For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father,
from Whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,
that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory,
that ye may be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inward man;
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;
to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,
may be strong to apprehend with all the saints
what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,
that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.
Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think,
according to the power that worketh in us,
unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus
unto all generations for ever and ever. Amen.
We said in this third chapter, it seems as though Paul is saying, “Now that we get a glimpse of what God is working toward, oh, that each one might know the inner strengthening, the inner expansion.”
Some people live in a mighty big horizon out here, but they have never had the inward enlargement.
Length and breadth and height and depth. Oh, that God would enlarge right here to go along with right here—the objective, yes; the subjective enlargement to contain.
My prayer and groaning these days seems to be, “Lord, let us get in the spirit of Paul’s prayer, that as we fellowship together, He will bring a newness and a freshness and an enlargement.”
We will not be content to live in our little framework, whatever it might be, but that God will enlarge in a way that is beyond our expectation.
And I am making this plea for us tonight: it will only come as we look to Him in this spirit of expectancy and prayer that I see in Paul.
It cannot be taught. Minds that have been filled with so many verses, and you can quote passages backwards and forwards—only God can break through here and make it livingly real.
But I believe He will, as we invite Him to do that.
This is the burden with which we begin the week.
I know that there are those who may slip in and say, “But are you not interested in people being saved?” I think it will be an amazing week if someone does not really find the Lord Jesus as their personal Savior.
Every year now—this is the fourth year—we have had lives come who are in great bondage: needs, habits, yokes, things in their lives that fettered them.
And I have had them say, “But thank God, He has broken the bondage. He has set me free.” But, you see, we are living in the larger framework of why God does this.
Of course, He is interested in us. But He is likewise interested in liberating us unto the thing for which He has laid hold of us.
You look back through the whole history of Israel and you find that there is one thing that rings out. God was all the time delivering a people out of their immediate predicament, out of their bondage, and He was wanting to bring them in line and focus that they might be the people of His purpose.
Here they are in Egypt, in great bondage, crying out to get free from the yoke of the Pharaoh. How much did they really see?
Well, God in mercy reached down and He delivered them out of Egypt in order that He might bring them unto the thing that He wanted.
The tragedy is that we only see our immediate deliverance. And you find the whole course of Israel follows right on through again and again. A leader steps in, trying to enlarge, to bring them into the fuller thing.
That same problem all through Israel’s history has plagued the church, and it is our problem tonight.
The question that confronts me continually as I move among the Lord’s people is, “Lord, how have You enlarged them to see what You want?”
We are so power-conscious. We are so need-conscious.
And in this day, when all of the church is crying out and trying to be relevant, to make the message relevant, to get right down—and here we are, and God in mercy lifts and delivers.
But if I understand the Lord’s way, He wants to bring us to see that which He has purposed, the large, straight line thing He is working toward. And that has a delivering power that liberates in a way that people can never be the same.
We talk about God having a remnant in this day. We talk about the Lord raising up testimonies in various cities that can be a corporate expression of people who are built together.
But the cry that comes to my own heart as I move around is, “Oh God, You must have some people in whom it is more than knowledge.”
And jobs, the material offers of this world, all of those things grow pretty dim because they have been caught by something that is bigger and something better. They are alive today.
Well, this is the burden of the week. Shall we pray?
Lord, we would not impose our burdens on anyone. We want Thy burden.
We do not tonight—we do not tonight come into this first service merely to tell Thee what we want, but to open our ear and say, “You lead us. You give us of Your anointing and Your direction.”
But we pray that in these days of fellowship there will be a very real awareness that we are shut up for the Lord.
Oh, we want the fellowship with the Lord’s people. We need the rest and the relaxation of getting apart. But I pray, as regards each one, Thou wilt not let us miss Thy personal word.
Having unveiled that larger thing You are working toward, oh, dear Lord, help us to know our dedication, our giving to Thee, in line with it.
We bring Thy people to Thee tonight. We claim each heart, that there will be that kind of exposure and that kind of reality.
Lord, we stand in need, as we wait before Thee, to know a fresh unveiling of Thyself, hour by hour.
Thank You for bringing us together now. Give us that expectancy of faith and confidence. We do ask in the name of the Lord Jesus, with thanksgiving. Amen.